More stuff to buy!

Press Q to use the health dispenser (once you've bought it!). Arrow keys for movement and crouching, spacebar to jump. Use arrow keys while swinging to increase his spin. Hold down spacebar to make the jump last longer. Hit spacebar again when holding on to a wall to wall jump. A is for punch and D for kick. Press S to hold a grenade, the release S to throw it (be careful - hold it too much and you'll blow up!

Hello!

I know! After four months of nothing Dreg is a hive of activity once more!

Actually, this update is not such a huge advance - mainly it's tweaks to the shop and combat and a new object to purchase...

The thing is, I just want to say thanks to everybody who has given me advice and criticism - it's all been so helpful. For this particular post, you'll see I've dealt with the comments by Todorus from the previous post (thanks todorus!). As for the difficulty, you start now with more health and money that should hopefully help the beginners among my fans (the new object should help too - more on that later).

Also, on the NewGrounds forum (in which most the posts are mine!), some guy called AdmittingZero wrote the following:

I don't understand how to buy anything in the shop or make him shut up.

Also I can just keep beating on the guys (when they're all standing on top of eachother), my punches hit all of them and none of them have a chance to fight back. The fighting needs to be a little bit more complex.

Ouch - he doesn't like snotty sam, and the combat, which I spent so long working on, isn't any good!

But the thing is, I went and tried what he was talking about, and he was right - you could just spam the A button over and over, and you'd eventually kill the thugs. It would take a long time, but it worked, because they could never hit back!

See, I'd originally thought that by having them block if you do the same move too often, players would be encouraged to vary their fighting. But that wasn't enough!

So now what I've done is that whenever a Thug blocks, there's a chance he'll do a quick counter. That way, if you keep spamming the same move you'll just get punched in the face. Haha!

It's also led to the nice emergent behaviour of apparent arguments between Thugs. If you've got two thugs in front of you and you kick, you tend to hit both. Now imagine both of them block. Then imagine that the one behind the first one does the quick counter, but just ends up hitting the one in front of him. Then the front one blocks and counters too, and it looks like they're just pissing each other off. It's hilarious and I love it. Wheeeee!

Anyway, it all goes to show the value of getting criticism.

Other changes include constantly visible instructions for the shop, and keeping health visible as you make your purchases - this is particularly important now with the addition of the Health dispenser! Yay, a new object!

Press Q to use the Health Dispenser, and it will replenish some of your health. You can upgrade the health dispenser both in the number of doses it can carry, and the amount of health it replenishes with each dose. To get the upgrades you need to leave the shop then enter again.

I went through a similar process in the design of the health dispenser as I had with Snotty Sam and the Holotec armour - the final version is much simpler (and better) than what I started out with.

I'm still not happy with the holotec armour but I really can't be bothered anymore!

Obviously, in the actual game there will be no shop like Snotty Sam's - different upgrades to armour and equipment will be found in different shops that the player will have to find.

Anyway, I'm ever closer to actually starting the game. There are still several tasks I need to deal with:

- More enemies! Argh! That'll be a fair amount of work, but I have to do it. That'll probably be my next task, to be honest - no point designing levels if I can't populate them.

- Getting lots of artwork done: I want to have a whole bunch of buildings, objects, and people to litter the world with to make it feel lived in, but also to make the background design faster (in the background I did a long time ago, I just drew each house individually, but that took too much time - I could still do that for some buildings, but it's best just to have a bunch of building blocks I can stick into the level)

- Figuring out scene-specifics like cut-scenes and boss battles

- Sorting out the ability to save. I've already got quite a lot of ideas how to do this and I think I'll be able to get it sorted pretty quickly, with small save files.

And I guess I also need to think about all the sound effects.

It still feels like there's a lot of work to do, but at the same time the light at the end is definitely getting bigger.





Wheeeee!

Money talks

Arrow keys for movement and crouching, spacebar to jump. Use arrow keys while swinging to increase his spin. Hold down spacebar to make the jump last longer. Hit spacebar again when holding on to a wall to wall jump. A is for punch and D for kick. Press S to hold a grenade, the release S to throw it (be careful - hold it too much and you'll blow up!

It’s a big update today!

Thing is, I don’t think anybody reads this actual blog post anymore (apart form you, Xenelement, thanks!) so I’m going to take this opportunity just to waffle on for ages, stream-of-consciousness style.

Oh and don’t worry – I removed the sounds because it was taking up too much time to test the movie. Can anybody explain how to compress MP3s to be directly used in Flash? No matter what I do, it wants to convert them as it compiles, apart from one mp3 which I downloaded from a site and which allows flash to “use imported MP3 settings”. How can I other MP3s that also get to use their own imported settings?

This was another one of those updates that saw disparate parts of the project coming together. I imagine you’ve noticed that there’s now a shop, and money to be earned! How do you earn it? You beat it out of your enemies, that’s how.

Everything is extra cheap at the shop so that you can buy stuff!

Now some of you might not have realised that there is a bigger map than the mini-map. Press M to access it. Do you remember that post oh-so-long ago where I first introduced the map? Yeah, it was horrendously ugly.

A couple of posts ago I updated it to have a lot of it drawn automatically for me, so that I don’t have to worry about drawing a map as well as designing a level. But it was still ugly.

The mini map is what did it for me – I decided to make the mini-map’s big brother share the same aesthetic, and here it is in all its glory:


I know it says “press s to set flag”, but ignore that for now, please!

This was plagued by a common problem I have while working on this project – wasting time on stupid nonsense. Specifically I wasted time on:

- making the screen to the right show the correct values for x and y (they are in metres by the way)

- adding rotation (what on Earth could be the point?). That took me ages to get right.

I also worked a pretty long time on the shop. It makes sense, though – I imagine in the future (and there will be plenty more games in the future) it’ll be useful for me to have a shop, and what with the flexibility of object orientated programming, a lot of what I’m doing now can be re-used again in the future.

With the shop, the biggest obstacles were actually graphic-design related, as opposed to programming. The two main issues were the holotec armour suit and Snotty Sam.

I started with the holotec armour, a blatant rip-off of the sort of energy field armour in the tremendously fantastic Mass Effect 2 (I don’t think you could actually see the energy armour in the first installment, which was also wonderful).

So I happily drew highly intricate, shiny energy armour for Dreg, which looked great, but when I loaded up the game, it was all so small that is was just a nasty mess (to be honest, it’s still a bit of a nasty mess, but whatever, I have to make this damn game!).

By the way – the armour does actually work – if you’ve got all of the holotec armour you’ll receive only 55% of the damage dealt to you…

Anyway, I quickly discovered that to make something visually appealing, I had to make it big, fun and simple. Hence the huge shoulder-pads and silly helmet. Now the armour adds to dreg’s silhouette considerably, in a way it has to, so as to compensate for its transparency. Then came drawing the shop, and giving it a salesman.

The thing is, Snotty Sam has been a character in Disarea for aaaages (when I was 18 I wrote a crappy sci-fi book set in the world – I write more about this in my ancient university-era site, which also has the comic).

The thing is, I’d always known Snotty Sam was an amalgamation of alien bits and bobs, due to an unpleasant experience in the badlands (he hints at this if you let him chat with you in the shop).

This was fine in the book, because that was all I needed to do – write that he’d been patched up with alien pieces, and that was it. Having to draw the bugger, on the other hand, posed a whole other problem.

The thing is, I’d never taken the time to properly visualise what Snotty Sam looked like, and I tried to draw him anyway. The stupid thing is, I already knew that this was a stupid idea (again, I wrote about this five years ago!), but I had so many things I needed to do in the game that I wanted to rush it. Obviously, this only meant more time-wasting.

So finally I gathered up the self-discipline to figure out what I wanted him to look like. Then Suddenly it was there, and here he is!



Again, simple, big silhouette, minimal alien modifications but a drastic change from his original form – though in the book it was fine to have him be a complex, amorphic mass of alien organs, it just doesn’t work visually (at least, not within my limited abilities!)

I went through a similar process with the currency – should I use coins? Symbols? AAARGH! Then I thought I’d just rip off Zelda. That was a solution I was happy with. Tell me what you think!